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Dominique Venner, Japan and China: The Diversions via Asia
Conversation with Clotilde Venner
Questions from Robert Steuckers
RS: Dominique Venner's detractors, or hyper-simplifiers of all kinds, too often caricature him as an embittered European, withdrawn into a narrow and outdated identity. However, if you look through the pages of the magazines he sponsored, you can see an interest in Japan - what can you say about that?
CV: All his life Dominique fought for European identity. His fight has taken different forms over the years. I think it was during the Algerian war, when he fought as a non-commissioned officer, that he became aware of the multiple threats to the European continent. He saw the Algerian War as a fight on the ‘limes’ of the European world. If that barrier was breached, there was a definite risk of migration. We have proof of that today. Once back in France, he joined Jeune Nation and then Europe Action, a life of political activism that led him to spend eighteen months in the Santé prison with the generals of the OAS.
During his imprisonment, he never stopped meditating and reflecting on how to direct his political action. His bedside book was Lenin's Que Faire?. It was during this enforced closure that he wrote Pour une critique positive. This little booklet for activists came out in the form of letters sent to friends. It was a work of self-criticism, in which he listed the faults undermining nationalist movements, but also set out the strategies that needed to be implemented.
Dominique ceased his political activities at the end of the 1960s and for some twenty years devoted himself to writing books on weapons and hunting. During these twenty years of ‘recourse to the forests’, to use Jünger's expression, he never ceased to answer a single question that haunted him: how can we explain Europe's suicide? It could be said that the twentieth century was the century of European suicide. To answer this question, he read and pondered all the great European authors, philosophers and historians alike, but he was also interested in other cultures, particularly Japanese culture.
One of his bedside books was La Mort volontaire au Japon by Maurice Pinguet. In this work, Dominique saw analogies between the traditions of the samurai and those of the European knights. The same sense of excellence, the same sense of sacrifice, the same acceptance of death. What struck him was the evolution of the French nobility. The day the nobles refused to pay the blood tax was the day they lost their legitimacy. When the marquises and dukes took refuge in the salons of Paris instead of fighting, they lost their raison d'être. One of the facts that marked him was that, with the exception of the Vendéens, very few nobles took up arms to defend their families who were arrested and taken to the scaffold by the revolutionaries. These aristocrats often died with elegance and dignity, but very few fought, as if the vital impulse had disappeared. For Dominique, this was already one of the signs of the decline of the nobility, and the diversions to Japan gave him a better understanding of the workings of both living and decadent aristocracies.
RS: Apart from Japan, he was also interested in China and the work of the sinologist François Jullien, as well as the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
CV: What he liked about François Jullien was his comparative work, his diversions via Asia. By taking a step to the side, by exploring Chinese thought, we can better grasp the specificities of European thought. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the ethnologist, was remembered for his differentialism. Dominique's detractors like to present him as a racialist, which is completely false as he truly was a differentialist. Like Lévi-Strauss, he thought it was completely absurd to compare civilisations. Civilisations are different planets with their own logic and particular values. If there was one current that he particularly castigated, it was the philosophy of the Enlightenment and its universalism.
Dominique was also struck by the fact that Europeans are driven by contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, they want to spread the Enlightenment to the rest of the world, and on the other, they have a propensity to be fascinated by elsewheres. Dominique discusses this phenomenon at length at the end of Histoire et traditions des Européens. We are in fact one of the rare cultures to cultivate xenophilia. The greatest orientalists are usually Europeans. He evokes the careers of Mircea Eliade and René Guénon.
Europeans always seem dissatisfied with their own culture and seek wisdom in the depths of Tibet, in the confluence of the Ganges or on the banks of the Nile, but never at home. Just look at the yoga craze in Europe. As if wisdom always had to come from somewhere else. This question haunted Dominique. Why do Europeans find other peoples' identities fascinating, but reject their own? Defending oppressed Tibetans is considered the height of progressive thinking, while defending oppressed Europeans is the height of racism.
Finally, it was in his testamentary book The Samurai of the West that he answered the question of a lifetime: what is the sacred book of the Europeans? All the great civilisations have sacred texts to which they refer. For the Chinese it's the Confucian Analects, for us it's the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is in the Homeric poems that the essence of the European spirit is expressed, the relationship to war, death, love, the relationship between men and women, the omnipresence of the divine in nature.
The current tragedy of Europeans is that they have forgotten who they were, they are victims of their qualities, an immense curiosity that has often been beneficial and has led to immense discoveries, but today they no longer know who they are, they have lost their inner compass. What Dominique is proposing is that we reclaim our own memory, our own culture, by referring to our founding text. It is because we have forgotten our memory that we have become so weak. The task of reclaiming is first and foremost a spiritual one. To take an interest in other cultures is not to dilute ourselves in something else, but to become aware of our specificities, our weaknesses, but also our greatness.
Video with the long interview of Clotilde Venner with Ego Non (Antoine Dresse) + How to order her book:
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